The Beautiful and the Damned

After London's Daily Mirror ran front-page photos of Über-model Kate Moss doing cocaine, the 31-year-old style icon lost contracts with Burberry, Chanel, and H&M reportedly totaling close to $4 million. But while the tabloids screeched about her decadent image and damaged career, the fashion elite rallied to her defense. Was she the victim of overzealous media or of her own edgy lifestyle? Talking to Moss's friends, Vanity Fair learns about the growing stress she felt, her devotion to her young daughter, and the dangerous inﬂuence of her hard-partying boyfriend, rocker Pete Doherty.

It's ten p.m. at the Boogaloo, and Gerry O'Boyle, the proprietor of this run-down pub in North London, says Kate and Pete—he's referring to Kate Moss, the model, and her boyfriend, Pete Doherty—are on their way. Across the bar, through a fog of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, the singer Shane MacGowan lurches toward a low stage with a plan to serenade patrons with Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea." The former Pogues front man sings, but no one hears—he has accidentally switched off the microphone. On the bar is a copy of News of the World, the British tabloid, bearing the latest Doherty headline: "Sorry Kate, just when you thought he couldn't get any worse, Doherty confesses … I SOLD DRUGS AND SERVICED OLD QUEENS!"

Things being what they are, Moss, 31, and Doherty, 26, may not show up. Someone has tipped off the press, and the paparazzi have descended, eager for the first pictures of the young lovers together. She, after all, is the beautiful model with a wild history all her own, he the self-destructive rock star living out Oscar Wilde's famous dictum: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Driven by its customary urge to deify and demonize, the British press has made the couple the biggest rock 'n' roll news story since the Sex Pistols. His friends want him to give up drugs; her friends want her to give up him. Neither is likely to happen: he's a veteran of rehab, and she, according to one friend, is "completely and utterly smitten."

So when, a few hours later, they finally make the scene, they appear like two skinny, black-clad insects, ducking in through a back entrance, past the bar and up the stairs to the safety of MacGowan's small apartment. It's probably not wise or healthy, but Moss and Doherty—to become Mr. and Mrs. Doherty this summer, if reports are correct—are delicious bohemians who make the red carpet look like a pedestrian crossing, a couple as decadently glamorous as any since Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards.

But where Moss is famous, Doherty is infamous: He is the former middle-class choirboy who speaks in dreamy wisps of thought and feeling. His first band, the short-lived Libertines, put excitement, as well as sex and drugs, back into rock 'n' roll. But before their second album, eponymously titled The Libertines, was even released, Doherty had been kicked out of the band—his drug addiction so destructive the rest of the group could no longer take it. He'll tell reporters that "crack's gorgeous," then recite poetry. In concert with his new band, the aptly named Babyshambles, if he turns up at all, he's liable to get into a fight. He's adept at treating the world as a bizarre visitation, at adopting various appealing, highly traditional poses: the beautiful loser, the street urchin, the delicate flower, Bambi gone bad.

Since January, when Doherty hooked up with Moss, he's been arrested and jailed, placed under curfew; he has canceled concerts, entered and exited rehab, and made at least part of an album in the mountains of Wales. "It's a mad life for Pete now," O'Boyle explains. "He's got photographers and the tabloids after him all day long. Pete's whole life is as romantic rebel; it's all about dreams. Reality can be harsh for him."

But in contrast with other periods, this has been a comparatively peaceful time for Doherty. Those around him would like to keep it that way. But as his on-again, off-again manager, James Mullord, says, Doherty's situation is a self-perpetuating horror story: "He's his own worst enemy when it comes to getting the wrong kind of attention." And so it is with publication of Kids in the Riot: High and Low with the Libertines. In the book, Doherty told author Pete Welsh that before he was successful he "was spanking off old queens for, like, 20 quid.… I remember once being taken back to this mews house in Chelsea, a right old fucking badger he was. It was a bit daft, actually. As he slept I locked him in his room, tied a pair of trousers over his head and nicked all these American dollar bills out of his drawer." And, he added with characteristic comic flourish, "he's probably still there with a hard-on, listening to Classic FM."

Three years ago, in 2002, the Libertines released Up the Bracket. Without that album, it's doubtful anyone would care much about Doherty now. The record was a hit in Britain. (It was too chaotic to be more than a critical hit in America.) With echoes of the Clash, the band was a perfect antidote to a stagnant music scene. Just as punk had, 25 years before, the Libertines offered something energetic and direct—"rock 'n' roll for the 21st century."

There were four members of the band, but creatively it relied on the intense, volatile relationship of the two front men—Doherty, the wayward son of a British Army major, and Carl Barât, the son of hippie parents and the more cautious of the pair. They had met in 1996 and bonded instantly, pledging to throw themselves hand in hand from an East London tower block in celebration of the fact. They lived in a fantasy, infusing their songs with nostalgia for William Blake's Albion (the idea of a mythic England that inspired the great romantic poets), and aspired to Arcadia, a land where the senses roam free. The geographic center of the dream was Filthy McNasty's—a predecessor to the Boogaloo—where Doherty once worked behind the bar. (It is said Merlin, the wizard, is buried beneath the pub, and that Ken Kesey came to pay homage.) The Libertines were literate ("Britpop meets Baudelaire," said one reviewer) and they wrote about their friendship, of drunken chaos and abandon. In their secondhand red officers' uniforms, their vanity all their own, their rebellion was anti-slick, anti-corporate, anti-apathetic. Comparisons to his former band were not lost on Clash guitarist Mick Jones, who volunteered to produce them. "Once in a while a band comes along that's like that, and they're the ones, and everybody sort of knew it," he said.

What the Libertines lacked in skill they made up for with attitude and energy. Their first single was titled "What a Waster." They played in pubs, they played in people's living rooms—they once even played in a brothel. They invited fans home and gave out their mobile-phone numbers. They played surprise "guerrilla" gigs. The band took its lead from the Strokes, the New York purveyors of retro garage rock. "But where the Strokes were tense and obsessed with being cool, the Libertines were the total opposite," explains former Blender editor Andy Pemberton. "They were shambolic, relaxed, and it all spilled out of them." Onstage, they were unpredictable and sexually ambiguous—Doherty and Barât would take their shirts off and sing pressed against each other. They had, Pemberton adds, "that whole homoerotic thing going on."

Like dozens of musicians before him, from Sly Stone to one of his heroes, Arthur Lee of Love, Doherty's habit of disappearing is central to his mythology. In 2003 he failed to show up for the entire Libertines European tour, prompting the first of several expulsions from the band. Andrew Male, deputy editor of Mojo magazine, draws a comparison between the singer and Bartleby the Scrivener, the character in Herman Melville's short story. The more Bartleby withdraws from the world, the more attention he receives. "Doherty is like all the great characters in literature who disappear from the text—he's the absence at the heart of the story. As he disappears, he becomes everyone's main preoccupation."

It takes several attempts over several weeks to meet him. The man who has produced far more sensational headlines than sales of his music justify—and who has become a central obsession of a country fixated on its own decadence and dissolution—is highly elusive. So when Doherty shows up in the small office behind the Boogaloo, he looks uncustomary, almost like an apparition. He is extremely tall and thin. He appears elastic, with long limbs that he spools and unspools. He's polite, considerate, and almost eager to please. Rare is the British rocker who doesn't like clothes, and Doherty is no exception. Wearing a porkpie hat, Cuban heels, and a worn black Dior suit and tie, he agrees his rapidly oscillating fortunes can be disconcerting. "It's fucking weird," he tells me. "One minute I'm in a prison tracksuit queuing for chicken and rice and the next minute I'm clobbered out in Dior."

From crack dens to fancy hotels, contrast has informed Doherty's life. In a world dominated by hard-polished glamour, the androgynous, wan singer ought to be a reject. The opposite is true—he's become a fashion icon. Hedi Slimane, the designer at Dior Homme, who has photographed Doherty extensively and given all the members of Babyshambles free clothes, describes the singer as being in the "purest tradition of British rock. Total elegant nonchalance. A mixture of punk and mod heritage, with so much innate grace. He is like a fallen angel onstage … a future authentic icon. The real thing." In return, Doherty gave the designer a taste of authentic London, taking him down the "front line" of the racially tense Whitechapel, where a friend of the singer's had been shot in the groin the previous night. "I took him to a few places he didn't feel comfortable with," Doherty says. "We got pulled over by the police, then the little Asian ninjas started on us. He had to get escorted back to his car by my mates."

At the Boogaloo, there is a measure of calm Doherty is grateful for. "It feels like I'm coming down," he says. "Prison and the security and the fucking pressure. People trying to get me to do this and do that. Here it's settled. There's no pressure. There's a jukebox. It's Arcadia."

While some in his immediate circle would like Doherty to get clean, with the 48-year-old Shane MacGowan as a role model it's an unlikely proposition—MacGowan, with a morbid countenance and the dress of a 19th-century undertaker, has made a second career out of his descent into severe alcoholism. And around both men are hangers-on, and acolytes, who bask in their celebrity.

Over a pint of Guinness, Doherty romantically describes the vision that has had such a powerful effect on him. "Albion is the name of the ship we happened to be traveling on. Arcadia, the destination—the realm of the senses, a rural idyll, a place to forget doubt," Doherty explains. "Above the cockiness, the clobber, the hairdos, it was something true … " His overriding aim, exemplified in his concerts, is to break down barriers. "All we're striving for is a writhing mass of bodies in unity," he says, drifting gently in and out of touch. "Whether you're on the stage or not, it's a celebration, an exultation … "

As Kate Moss's consort, Doherty has not had such a smooth entrée into society. At a party in London in April, he was cavorting "like a palomino pony," knocking things over, when a playboy heir to an industrial fortune told Doherty to stop being an asshole. As he turned away, Doherty smacked him upside the head and he fell, hurt, bleeding from his ear. Doherty rang him the next day to apologize.

Casual violence is a kind of punctuation for Doherty; during our conversation he abruptly bashes his head against the wall to make a point.

Onstage, his performance owes more to chaos than to choreography. He was thrown off Top of the Pops for fighting with a member of the audience. At one of the last Libertines concerts, at London's Brixton Academy, in February last year, Doherty thought Barât had given him an odd look as they played "Can't Stand Me Now," a song about their strained relationship. Doherty kicked over Barât's amplifier and smashed his guitar. Earlier this year, at a concert in Brixton with Babyshambles, Doherty collided with the bass player, staggered backward, and threw a punch. The pair rolled on the stage before half a dozen roadies jumped in to break it up.

One strain of voyeuristic interest is to wonder if Doherty has the constitution to play a latter-day Richards to Moss's Pallenberg; the consensus is he may be too delicate. (Pallenberg has actually been something of a guide to Moss in the customs and conventions of being a rock 'n' roll mistress.) Still, he's not without detractors—some think he's a male version of another tabloid fixation, Jordan, a topless model with giant bosoms who turns up just about anywhere in Britain there's publicity to be had.

"I believe he is now living up to an archetype that has figures like Coleridge and Baudelaire at the time-hallowed end of the self-destructive-visionary-artist spectrum, and Sid Vicious at the other; Kurt Cobain, I guess, is somewhere in the middle," says rock writer Mat Snow.

Those who know Doherty well say he's always been this way. He was brought up on different military bases and, after achieving high grades at school, followed his twin passions, soccer and music, starting a fanzine devoted to his favorite team (Queens Park Rangers) and contributing poetry to various underground publications. Lucy Barât, Carl's sister, remembers sharing an apartment with the two of them. "He'd put Noël Coward records on to get to sleep. We'd go to buy milk in the morning and he'd put a bowler hat on and buy Le Monde, even though he doesn't speak French. He's always been like that. He's aware of reality—he just chooses to add to it."

In April, Babyshambles were sequestered in the mountains of Wales making their first album until they were thrown out of the studio. (Doherty trashed the cottage the band was staying in, and that was after they had been caught smuggling meat pies—the studio is strictly vegan—and other supplies onto the premises. The final straw came when the security company hired to stop Doherty from breaking a court-mandated curfew refused to let him leave. "So I tried to drive the security fella's car back to London. I tried to reverse it down the mountain, but the road was so narrow and I got caught in a ditch," he says nonchalantly. "So we got chucked out of Wales. Miranda [Jones, Mick's wife] was furious.")

There's much riding on the album, and it will answer the question that hangs over Doherty—if, amid the drugs and chaos, he still has a good record in him. With Moss on backing vocals, Doherty says he's pleased with the results so far: "I will say that [the Babyshambles anthem] 'Fuck Forever' is as good a song as I ever heard."

As one traces the story back, there isn't much time between the Libertines' first success, in 2002, and their self-destruction—barely enough time, in fact, to establish a reputation based on their music. Doherty and Barât did what rock stars do: they got high, slept around, and played loud music. But where Barât had brakes, Doherty had only an accelerator, and it was pressed to the floor. In July 2003, while the Libertines were on tour in Japan without him, Doherty broke into Barât's apartment and stole an antique guitar, laptop, mouth organ, and CD player belonging to Barât's sister, who in agreement with singer Lisa Moorish, the mother of Doherty's young son, Estile, turned him in to the police.

Doherty looked astonished when he was sentenced to six months in jail. (It was reduced to two months with time off for good behavior.) When he strolled out of Wandsworth prison—with his things, mostly fan mail, stuffed in a bag stamped "Her Majesty's Prison Service" slung over his shoulder—to a tearful reunion with Barât, it was, noted Mojo, "the beginning of his descent into the heaven/hell of being the most beautiful, doomed and talented fuck-up of his generation."

Last spring the Libertines recorded their second album, with security guards in the studio to keep the pair from coming to blows. Instead of unity, they sang of their bitterness and disappointment. By the time it was released, Doherty was out of the band for good, his exit preceded by another abortive spell in rehab in England, after which he was flown to Thailand to complete his detox at the Thamkrabok monastery, 100 miles north of Bangkok. Displaying his capacity for embellishment, Doherty explains he "was strong-armed onto a plane and dumped in the jungle." After three days of being attended to by monks bearing emetic remedies, he fled. "I had no choice," he says. "When I said I needed to make a call, the phone lines were down; when I wanted my passport, they'd lost the number to the safe. It turned into a horror film." Between good spirits and bad curses, the story is hard to follow. Doherty checked into a Bangkok hotel and ordered heroin from the bellboy on credit. When the credit ran out, it was time to make a getaway. "A girl who works for the Bangkok Times smuggled me out in a hamper basket," he explains.

Back in England, the Libertines issued Doherty with yet another ultimatum: he could rejoin the band if he gave up crack and heroin. Doherty retorted with one of his own: he'd give up drugs if they let him back in the band. Predictably, nothing came of it. "They left me on the side of the road, with a plastic bag and all kinds of bitterness," he complained. Pete and Carl stopped speaking. Carl explained they couldn't carry on and shunned his friend: "Peter was going to die or someone was going to get killed." Even their manager, Alan McGee, a man of long experience with difficult musicians, threw in the towel: "They're the most extreme band I've ever worked with," he told Pete Welsh. "It's sort of not rock 'n' roll. I don't know what it is. Mental illness, probably."

Doherty already had a new band, Babyshambles. That, too, soon became a pantomime of canceled shows, backstage overdoses, fights with hecklers—and other band members—and fan riots. (In December, a Babyshambles concert in London was called off after the audience waited several hours; they rioted, stormed the stage, and destroyed and stole $50,000 worth of equipment.) Accolades and trouble kept rolling in, hand in hand: Doherty was named 2004's Cool Icon of the Year by New Musical Express, and the Libertines were voted the Greatest Band in Britain by The Guardian. Doherty stole a drug dealer's car that he was later told had a couple thousand pounds hidden in the trunk. After he was caught, "they hung me upside down off a balcony and shook me," he recalls. "One foot each." In another scrape, Doherty was given a four-month suspended sentence for possessing a switchblade. Rarely short of a comic flourish, Doherty arrived at the hearing playing songs with his head poking out of a car sunroof. He said he was "innocent"; the court was told he was a "placid and gentle man."

But his condition could no longer be easily disguised: a photograph of Doherty standing onstage with his eyeballs rolled up into the back of his head was published by practically every paper on Fleet Street. Then, last December, the respected current-affairs show Newsnight invited Doherty on the program to explain himself. He smoked a cigarette, played guitar, and recited one of the poems that had won him a place on a cultural-exchange trip to Russia when he was 16. Plainly enamored with her subject, interviewer Kirsty Wark pressed the singer on whether he made drugs look glamorous and attractive to young fans. Unfazed, Doherty pointed out, "I've yet to have someone come and ask me for my drug dealer's number."

It was not until January that the drama peaked with the entry of Moss. She invited him to play at her 31st-birthday party, and it was, friends say, love at first sight—or at least a coming out, depending on whom you listen to. Doherty made no secret of his infatuation, telling his friends he'd marry her as soon as they were able. He already had a song for her, "What Katie Did," from the Libertines' last album: "Oh whatcha gonna do, Katie, you're a sweet, sweet girl / But it's a cruel, cruel world."

On the forthcoming Babyshambles record, Doherty says, there will be a reprise: "What Katie Did Next." While some say Moss is besotted, others are less convinced, and predict he's a passing fancy. But as one of her friends says simply, "She sure knows how to pick 'em." His friends, too, have mixed feelings. After it was reported she dumped him on Valentine's Day, Babyshambles tour manager Matt Bates branded her "the ultimate groupie." Carl Barât ventured: "When we were growing up we all wanted to sleep with Kate Moss. Then you form a band and it becomes a possibility." But he judged, perhaps jealously, the union to be "doing Pete no good."

Soon after the couple met, on a night when they were supposed to be going on a candlelight-and-a-good-night-kiss date, Doherty, joined by a friend, made a detour to visit documentary-film maker Max Carlish at a North London hotel. (While some in Doherty's camp are known to supply the press with paid-for revelations, Carlish, acting without authorization, had sold pictures of Doherty smoking heroin to the Sunday Mirror for $60,000.) The pair gave Carlish two black eyes and a broken nose, and were arrested on robbery (they stole his wallet) and blackmail charges. (All charges were eventually dropped.) Doherty was held in London's grim Pentonville prison until his record company could come up with $300,000 to secure his release on bail. The company originally offered the court security in the form of future earnings—which the judge refused—so the singer languished in jail for six days. Upon his release, Doherty informed the press that he thought he "was going to die" in prison and, winningly, how his love for Moss persuaded him "to sort my life out."

"Thinking of Kate got me through this," the singer said.

The judge ordered him back into treatment and placed him under a 10-p.m.-to-7-a.m. curfew. Carlish expressed concern that Doherty thinks he's Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. "Heroin was a fashion accessory, like a supermodel girlfriend," Carlish told The Guardian. "He thinks he's stronger than his habit, and that his hits will outlive his habit, but I'm not so sure." Doherty, with new responsibilities in mind, volunteered—supposedly at Moss's urging—to have a naltrexone implant inserted in his abdomen to null the effect of opiates and make heroin, the theory goes, not worth taking.

It's a plan, at least, and Doherty says he's determined to straighten himself out. "It was get an implant or die, really, the way things were," he says. "I was fixing up, shooting white, shooting brown, and then entering a relationship—I mean, God knows, [Kate] saved my life, and, really, I had to choose. She's got a young kid, I have a young kid, and there's no way it could happen with, um …

"Drugs are a very selfish thing," he adds. "It goes against a lot of the central tenets of the things I have always claimed to believe in—the Arcadian dream of the freedom of the senses, not oppressing anyone, and not being oppressed."

When Doherty's affair with Moss hit the headlines, the tabloid press, even with its penchant for fantasy, was handed an irresistible situation. "It was a crime story, a rehab story, a love story, a rock 'n' roll story. Then the Kate Moss thing blasted it into orbit," says Nick Buckley, deputy news editor of the Sunday Mirror. "This is a great, great rock 'n' roll couple. This is the world's most beautiful woman, who likes to party hard. Yet she always manages to look like Snow White the next morning. [And] he always makes good copy because there's nothing dull in his life."

The subtext is clear: "There is a wonderful analogy with Sid and Nancy," says Buckley frankly. "Are they reliving the last days of the Sex Pistols? Is this going to end in a sordid hotel room?" (He says no.)

The serious press, too, had what it wanted: a tabloid story of sex and drugs it could report on while applying remedial doses of concerned self-righteousness. But in a country where drugs are cheap, alcohol is cheaper, and everyone is getting smashed, it sometimes seems as if Doherty is bearing the weight of the nation's vices. From top to bottom, the British classes are grinding their teeth: Sir Ian Blair, the new Metropolitan Police commissioner, recently launched a campaign against rampant middle-class cocaine use; provincial police forces are engaged in a battle to curb gangs of binge-drinking teenagers who make town centers no-go areas at weekends. Presaging proposals for tougher sentences on drug dealers, Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative Party, wondered aloud how it is that "a man who takes drugs and gets locked up … ends up on the front pages." Doherty retorted, "Crack and heroin are an epidemic. It's not like I'm the one person taking drugs and changing lives."

Babyshambles recently lost drummer Gemma Clarke, who told Doherty she no longer wanted to be "part of a machine that I feel is destroying you." At the same time, Doherty is in demand, receiving an invitation to read poetry at the annual Patti Smith–curated Meltdown festival in London. (Doherty is credited with single-handedly sparking a revival of interest in poetry.) Babyshambles, meanwhile, will play this summer's Glastonbury Music Festival, with Moss reportedly joining the band onstage. Doherty and Barât have spoken again for the first time in nearly a year. And if the papers are correct, there's Kate Moss to marry (possibly at Glastonbury, according to one report). Asked if he's received any wisdom in all this, Doherty, subdued, and in a whisper laced with defiance, quotes from the Libertines song "Can't Stand Me Now."

"Cornered," he says, "the boy kicked out at the world. The world kicks back, a lot fucking harder now."

Vicky Ward is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and has written for the magazine on various Washington personalities, including counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, and Sharon Bush, ex-wife of Neil Bush.